Precarious employment and the insertion of young people in to the labour market

Pauline Givord

Since the start of the 1970s, we have seen the gradual decline of full-time open-ended
contracts, which were once the employment «norm». This decline has led to the rapid
development of different types of «precarious employment» during the past two decades.
The number of people on temporary and subsidised contracts increased fourfold between
1982 and 2001; the number of other fixed-term contracts increased threefold. These
different types of precarious employment may still only represent a minority of the
total employment (15 % of private sector employment in 2002), yet they represent for
many the only way in to the labour market. In 2002, one in three people who had been
in the labour market for less than five years were on a temporary employment contract.
Several basic indicators over the past twenty years have shown that the conditions
of insertion of young people in to the labour market worsened between the start of
the 1980s and the end of the 1990s. Unemployment figures for young people continued
to rise, despite greater flexibility. Young people often entered the labour market
in temporary employment, but this decreasingly led to an open-ended employment contract.
Entrants to the labour market had an increasingly high risk of losing their job. Furthermore,
the inequalities increased amongst diploma holders: the employment situation of people
without a diploma compared to that of those most qualified was much more difficult
at the end of the 1990s than at the start of the 1980s.
Access to employment seems easier for holders of a higher education technical diploma
(such as the DUT, a two-year technical diploma, or the BTS, a vocational training
certificate taken after the baccalauréat) than for those holding a general education
diploma, despite the equivalent length of their studies. The relative advantage for
holders of a professional or technological baccalauréat is less apparent.